


Do-Over

by vitreousmonotreme



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Father-Daughter Bonding Through Temporal Shenanigans, Gen, Time Travel, aka Going Back In Time To Mug Your Own Father In An Alleyway, mentions major character death but like... in a time travel way, mentions married/parenting jupeter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 15:59:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10390434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vitreousmonotreme/pseuds/vitreousmonotreme
Summary: Peter Nureyev has a conversation with his daughter; which would be fine, except that he and Juno don't have a daughter yet, she's wearing a time machine on her wrist, and he doesn't much like the news she's brought from the future.





	

**Author's Note:**

> anon on tumblr asked "Okay so MAYBE I've been reading too much Xmen but I'm really into the idea of characters meeting their time displaced future kids and I'd die to see a Penumbra version? Bonus points if they're from ~the darkest timeline~ where their parents are dead"  
> and I'd been listening to too much ars paradoxica, so this happened

The person following Nureyev down the alleyway was good; _very_ good. No one else would have heard her footsteps, mirroring his exactly, without echo. She could have crept up on anyone else.

But not on him, which seemed almost a shame as he spun, caught her, had her pinned to the ground in a heartbeat. He’d never been one for prolonging a fight, and he’d never had the brute strength for the kind of hand-to-hand that Juno went in for; but his spouse had insisted that Nureyev broaden his technique to include a number of useful throws and holds after a few too many close shaves and a few too many dead bodies. And besides, he had a few questions.

“Now,” he said politely, pressing the swearing girl’s face into the pavement. She really was a girl, barely out of her teens at the outside, and he was glad he hadn’t gone for the knife. “We meet at last.”

“Get off!”

“After all,” he continued, unperturbed, “aren’t you the one who’s been trying to interfere with my work for the past week and a half? Trying very admirably, I’ll admit. This was uncharacteristically clumsy of you. So, who hired you?”

“I’m not working for anyone.” Her voice was impressively petulant, considering it was muffled by most of his weight and the gritty concrete beneath her.

“I don’t appreciate lying,” Nureyev said. “You’re certainly very talented for your age, but not talented enough, I think, to have had the kind of information on me which you clearly do. Those pitfalls were _very_ personalized. You know how I work, which means you’re with someone _I’ve_ worked with before. Or worked against. It makes no difference. If you were foolish enough to try mugging me in an alleyway, they can’t have told you enough about me.”

“You’re making a mistake,” she said.

“Wrong again. I’m making a profit off yours,” Nureyev said, placing his knee in the center of her back and hearing the air leave her with an _oof_. He loosened his hold just enough to reach down and begin rifling through her pockets, the work of only seconds; she wasn’t carrying much, although he noticed some kind of sleek, complex personal device which wrapped all the way around her arm. It was a little petty, perhaps, but the prospect of rethinking his technique enough to evade this mysterious new adversary was irritating, even as it excited him. Juno would be furious.

As soon as he touched the device, the girl started to struggle far more desperately. “Do _not_ take that,” she said. “That is a bad, bad idea – ”

He tightened his grip, and something on the device _beeped_. There was a second of rapidly gaining white noise, a sensation of heat, a bright flash –

Nureyev sprawled backwards on the concrete of the alley, the girl next to him. There was someone coming around the corner, he realized blurrily, disoriented; he could hear the footsteps.

He could have half sworn that the girl ran _with_ him behind the storage container, but at any rate, they ended up pressed against the metal, Nureyev twisting her arms up behind her back with one hand and covering her mouth with the other, but not really paying attention because he was staring through a chink in the metal at _himself_ , walking down the alleyway.

It was unmistakable, a living mirror. Nureyev knew a hologram when he saw one, and this wasn’t it. And when the girl’s doppelganger appeared around the corner, following behind him, and his own double turned and pinned her to the ground, a surreal, impossible thought occurred to him.

The other Nureyev reached for the girl’s wrist; she tried to pull away, and both of them vanished.

There was a long silence, broken only by the muffled sounds of the city at the end of the alleyway and the dripping of water from a nearby pipe. Then Nureyev lifted his hand off the girl’s mouth and said, “You have ten seconds to explain what just happened.”

“You’re not stupid, it’s obviously a time machine,” the girl said hurriedly. “I’m from the future and I’m trying to _help_ you.”

Nureyev frowned. “So you’re _not_ the person who’s been sabotaging me?”

A pause. “Uh, no. I am,” she said. “That’s how I’m helping you.”

“ _Excellent_ logic,” he said. “What just happened?”

“There’s an emergency switch on the device,” she said. “Moves you in time one minute. You activated it.”

He considered it. And to his surprise, he believed it. After all, he’d seen stranger. Or things _as_ strange, at least.

“You could let me go now,” the girl suggested hopefully.

“Alright,” Nureyev said, not letting go. “Let’s presume that you are, in fact, from the future. I think what you need to tell me now is why I should believe that you’re sabotaging me for my own good.”

A pause, and then she said, “I know your name is Peter Nureyev.”

Nureyev considered this for a second. Then he twisted one of her arms ever so slightly further. “Certainly a dramatic choice,” he said. “But just as much of a threat as an assurance. Who are you, then, that you would know my name? What’s _yours_?”

“Mona,” the girl yelped. “Harmonia, Harmonia Steel, go easy!”

Every one of Nureyev’s trains of thought stopped and rerouted to the same destination. “Steel,” he said. “What do you mean, Steel?”

“It means that you and Juno weren’t stupid enough to give me your last name, Dad,” the girl snapped. “Now would you let me _go_?”

All of the strength he was not using to hold her down was suddenly going to making sure his hands did not start to shake. “Prove it,” he said. “Give me one piece of evidence that _actually proves_ – ”

“He didn’t call you Peter until your wedding vows and when you asked he said he was scared of being the first person to say it to you in twenty years but it seemed stupid to leave it out,” Mona said, all in one breath. “You two bicker constantly about whether sawdust coffee is even worth drinking, he has a birthmark on his lower left back and you like to poke him there to make him jump, you’re allergic to shellfish but he _still_ doesn’t know because you think it makes you look silly – ”

His hands seemed to let go, his legs to move him up and away from her a step or two of their own accord. Nureyev stared at her, observing with new eyes, awed eyes. “You’re…”

“I’m your daughter,” Mona said, rolling upright with a wince. “And wow, you are _heavier_ than you look.”

Nureyev looked at her – a young woman, sharp-eyed, tentatively smiling at him after her attempt at joking. A young woman smiling at _her father_ , a young woman that he had raised – that he _would_ raise, and who had, improbably, arrived in his now _._ It all made sense, of course – he wouldn’t have admitted it for a heartbeat, but the uncanny accuracy with which his previously unknown adversary had been anticipating his every move had frustrated and spooked him. But that was perfectly reasonable if she’d learned them straight from him. If he’d raised her to the job.

He felt sick.

“You’re a thief,” he said flatly. “I don’t know what I’ll be like in the future, but let me tell you, in the present I do _not_ approve.”

“Oh, hell, no,” Mona said. “No, you and Juno, both of you taught me a few things, but believe me, there were always two big rules in our home, no growing up to be a thief or a detective. Both of you are gonna be _really_ emphatic about that.”

“Then what _do_ you do?”

“I’m working on it,” she said. “I was thinking anthropology? Oh, come on, don’t look at me like that, it was a joke. Anyway, I’m not here to give you spoilers for the next twenty years.”

Nureyev caught the thought that he had at least twenty good years with Juno coming up, and filed it away to spend some time with when there was not business to attend to. “Alright then, Mona. Tell me, why did you travel twenty years into the past to mug your father in an alleyway?”

“Someone hired you to steal a data chip from the Duchess of New Ithaca,” she said. “I’ve been trying to stop you without having to _tell_ you all of this, and maybe screw up our entire timeline.”

“Unfortunately I think it’s too late for that on a number of counts, dear,” Nureyev said, reaching into his pocket. On its chain, the data chip caught the dim light of the alleyway, and its crystal circuits sparkled. “You’ve told me everything, and I’ve already stolen the chip.”

“I know,” she said miserably. “This was my last resort – I thought maybe if I could steal it back off you I could return it quick enough.”

Nureyev stared at her. “And you decided to do that by sneaking up behind me in an alleyway,” he said, half in disbelief.

“…I’m Juno’s daughter too?”

Caught off guard, he laughed, and she did too, for half a moment. “Wow,” she said, “this is… so _weird_. You just look so _young_.”

“I take it I’ve gone gray in the future, then,” Nureyev sighed. “Hm? No? Oh, no, I haven’t gone bald, have I?”

The smile had faded from Mona’s face, and she stared at him, as though she didn’t know how to find the words. “In the future,” she said slowly, “where I came from – _when_ I came from, you’re – you’re dead.”

He stopped laughing, and looked back at her, the anguish in her eyes.

“That’s why I’m trying to stop you,” she said. “It’s – we don’t really understand yet, you know, how this thing works, what effects it will have – it’s half cannibalized Martian teleporter and half Dark Matters tech and we’re half sure that if you create a paradox with it it’ll tear apart reality itself – but I _had_ to, because you steal that chip, and twenty-four hours later they realize it’s missing, and unless that doesn’t happen, unless it’s _not gone_ by that time, then there’s nothing I can do, _nothing_ that will stop the chain of events that ends in twenty years with the Duchess killing you, and now it’s _too late_.”

 _Twenty good years_.

Nureyev had been roped into watching a few of Rita’s shows on occasion, and time travel was a surprisingly frequent plot point. He sincerely doubted the programs were what you might call _scientifically_ accurate, but he’d paid enough attention to be aware of the theoretical problems of changing your own past. And he’d paid attention when Mona said _tear apart reality itself_.

“There’s no other course?” he asked, very quietly.

“I had one shot,” she said. She wasn’t crying despite her choked voice, which didn’t surprise him; he had no doubt that he and Juno would be more than anxious to do their best as parents, but both of them were _awfully_ good at bottling things up. “I tried everything I could think of, and I can’t just go back and do it over. If I meet myself, that could be the end of _everything_. Literally everything, the entire universe. And knowing it’ll happen isn’t – isn’t going to help you.”

That settled that, then. This had been the tightest, most finely planned heist of his career, and the obstacles Mona had given him had cut it yet closer. There were no further gaps, no place left to jam the machinery, much less without paradoxically contacting himself.

“Mona,” he said, as gently as he could manage. He didn’t know this girl, didn’t love her yet, but the knowledge that he would, the way she was looking at him, the fact of a kid of not more than eighteen or nineteen with the life or death of their father in their hands, weighed against uncountable lives  –

The world, or your life. Everyone else, or the one who mattered. He knew the choice he’d make.

“Mona, I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry that fate has led us here. And I want you to know that I don’t blame you.” He put one hand over hers. “So I want you to go back. Go home.”

“You – ”

“I’ve always known the risks, my darling,” he said, managing a sad smile. He even meant it, in that moment, he really, truly did. “This is not a job that tends to lead to a long life, after all – but you’ve just _given_ me that, Mona. Twenty years is – is more than I ever could have expected. Twenty years with you and Juno is more than I could have ever dreamed of. I _never_ could have predicted such a piece of happiness coming into my life as Juno – I never could have predicted _you_ , Mona. And knowing will make every second of it that much more precious. So go back and take care of him for me.”

Mona stared at him in disbelief for a second, and then her eyes hardened. “Dad,” she said, “she killed Juno, too.”

Nureyev’s world stopped.

“What?”

“I can’t stop that either,” she said. “This was my only chance. All or nothing. I took a gamble and I lost.”

Juno was dead.

No, he thought, forcing his mind to organize, forcing himself to think – no, Juno was fine, safe on Mars, safe for another twenty years. But then, yes, dead.

Peter Nureyev reconsidered his decision.

The near-certain risk of ending reality itself. Or living twenty contented years knowing he’d done nothing to save the life of Juno Steel.

Absolutely everything ending. Or a universe that kept happily, blindly turning, but without Juno Steel in it. Either way, no Juno. And then - and _then -_  the _slimmest_   chance of saving him.

He weighed the options. It wasn’t a hard choice. Not even close.

“Well, then, Mona,” he said, brushing alley grime off his coat. “You’ve been acting here for about two weeks, yes? Back three weeks, this time, I think that should be enough – ”

“I told you,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything else I can do. You’re _unstoppable_ on this job. You bragged about it my whole life. I’ve had fifteen years to figure it out and I still couldn’t _do_ it.”

“You very nearly did,” Nureyev said. “But you’re _you_ , Mona, and not quite me, for which I’m very thankful. And you’d need a thief exactly as experienced as I am to come up with a way to stop me from stealing that chip.”

“Which I’m not,” Mona said. “I know.”

“No,” he replied brightly. “But _I_ am. And really, isn’t beating yourself at your _own_ best con infinitely more worth bragging about?”


End file.
